Following is a talk I gave in April 2022 at my alma mater, Earlham College, from which I graduated in 1992 with a degree in Japanese Studies.
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First of all, thank you for inviting me back to Earlham, a place I’ve rarely been able to visit over the years. At the end of 2019 I moved back to the US mainland for the first time in two decades, so I haven’t had this chance very often. Returning to Earlham is something I’ve been eager to do for a while, so I want to offer a special thank you to Professor Dyron Dabney and everyone associated with the Japanese Studies program and Institute for Education on Japan for inviting me to speak here.
As a novelist, I’m not sure how much I deserve this event. I’m not out there fighting for the big issues of our time like I’m sure many other Earlham graduates are doing – and in some cases have devoted all their lives to – but I suppose I do represent someone who took a different path than most after graduating from this college, perhaps pursued a different dream than most, and somehow achieved a degree of success in both things. So I’m very grateful to be here today, and very honored, but uncertain if I’ve truly earned this moment. Hopefully I’ll keep your interest for the next 45 minutes or so, in any case.
In my talk today, I’ll try to explain how I became a Japanese Studies major at Earlham, then became a writer, then how at age forty-one I made my way to Japan to live and work for the first time in my life, followed by a brief discussion of my novel and a short reading from it.
JOURNEY FROM JAPANESE STUDIES MAJOR TO RETURNING ALUMNUS
This won’t be an academic talk, but rather a personal story I share, one in which I expect some students here to see similarities with their own lives and potential life paths. The paths I’ve taken to where I am today have been circuitous, but I feel that where I am now is where I’m supposed to be. True, I’m fifty-two and in yet another transitional phase – although I moved back to the U.S. two years ago from Japan, I’m now relocating temporarily to Cincinnati, then will be living in Japan again soon, perhaps permanently – but I’m confident in my next destination and what awaits me there. Without my Japanese Studies degree from Earlham, the life path I’ve been on for three decades now never would have been set in motion. And for that I couldn’t be more grateful.
STUMBLING INTO THE JAPANESE STUDIES MAJOR
I want to go back a bit in time and try to put myself in your shoes – the shoes of the students I see before me. Imagine, then, that I’m twenty years old, it’s the fall term in 1990, and I’ve burned through at least one major that I can recall, Biology, and am leaning with some uncertainty toward a Spanish major. I’m conversational in the language and have just applied for a six-month study abroad program in Valencia, Spain, which looks amazing. The only problem is that it will conflict with the following year’s soccer season, and at twenty soccer means a great deal to me. Anyway, with the application to Valencia submitted and a long wait to go to Spain ahead of me, for some reason I decide to dip my toes into the Japanese Studies major: I take a Japanese language class as well as a Japanese Arts class. I’m still not sure why. I think it has to do with not being able to take classes I want to in Spanish that term, having friends majoring in Japanese Studies who encourage me in this direction, and because I want to see for myself what makes Earlham’s Japan Studies department so universally respected. Or maybe it’s just my fate. But those two classes, for the first time in my life, make me interested like never before in a particular academic subject. I know nothing about Japan prior to the fall trimester. But by the end of it, I’ve withdrawn my application to study in Valencia and have been accepted instead to Earlham’s Hokkaido Intensive Program, where over the spring and summer of 1991 I’ll study Japanese intensively, and anthropology, too, and live with a Japanese host family; a real, immersive experience in Japan. Just like that, I decide with a certainty I’ve never felt before on what to major in: Japanese Studies. And in my junior year, no less. Going to Sapporo for five months won’t conflict with the soccer season, and I’ll also make up for lost time during the summer getting credits for my new major.
My time in Sapporo ends up being one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, solidifies my interest in Japan, and I have such a hard time leaving that I actually consider taking time off from Earlham to find work there. But I come back, and soon I graduate.
AFTER GRADUATING FROM EARLHAM: SAN FRANCISCO & VIETNAM
After graduating, I’m eager to get to Japan again but don’t know how. It’s not like it will be thirty years later, with the Internet overflowing with information, and opportunities to work in Japan a simple Google search away. The fact is, I don’t know how to get back. But I’m young, and I see life stretching out so long before me that I can’t possibly descry the end of it. In other words, there’s no hurry, is there? It’s okay to take life as it comes. And life comes to me most meaningfully after graduation in the form of an opportunity to move West, which as an Ohio native I find incredibly exciting. I end up moving to San Francisco and luck out getting a job at The Asia Foundation. It’s the first job I apply for in San Francisco, and I wander into the organization with my CV in hand, no appointment at all, blithely hoping for the best, and am told that only thirty minutes before my arrival someone in an entry level position has suddenly quit. The organization’s director is called over from his office, he glances at my CV, and, despite his lingering confusion at my being there with such impeccable timing, asks me if I can start work the next day. However, such luck rarely lasts. Six months later The Asia Foundation decides to shut down the division I’m working in, and I’m faced with having to find a new job. My supervisor at the time had been a volunteer teacher in Indonesia for two years with an organization run by someone with a Quaker background – perfect, right? – and she suggests that I apply to volunteer as a teacher in Vietnam, which has only just reopened to the world – opened a mere crack, really – and where virtually no Americans are. There’s not even a US consulate. If I’m accepted, I’ll go over with five other volunteers for a year or two and be among the first Americans since the end of the Vietnam War nineteen years earlier to live and work in the country. Sounds interesting. Another adventure to fit into my young life before I find my way back to Japan. A detour, I think.
VIETNAM AND FINALLY BACK TO JAPAN
Okay, let’s dispense with the present tense. I’m going to start talking normally now as someone looking back in time.
Well, Vietnam, which hadn’t previously been much on my radar, suddenly became the center of my life. And it remained that way, despite a handful of returns to the US. Between 1994 and 2011, I lived there five different times for around ten years total. Until now, I’ve actually lived there seven different times for almost twelve years, but in 2011, in the immediate aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant disaster that devastated a large area of Japan and saw thousands of foreigners flee the country, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer to return to Japan. I was forty-one, living in Hanoi, and I knew it wouldn’t do to put off looking for work in Japan any longer. And the news I saw on TV from March 11th completely jolted me. Out of a sense, suddenly, of wanting to embrace similar challenges that people in Japan were facing during this crisis I applied for a job at an eikaiwa, or private English-language school, in Akita City, Akita prefecture, in northern Honshu – in Tohoku, in fact. Luckily for me, over a Skype interview, the school offered me employment. In May 2011 I finally moved to Japan to live and work, fulfilling a dream of mine to get back – albeit in uncertain circumstances – a promise I’d made myself nineteen years earlier when I graduated from Earlham with a degree in Japanese Studies.
MOVING TO KANAZAWA
My life then, after deciding to move to Akita, took some complicated turns, but four years later, my wife and I found ourselves relocating to Kanazawa, from where I would commute to a university teaching job in Fukui, in the prefecture directly south of us, which took almost two hours each way. We chose to live in Kanazawa over other places we could have lived, like Fukui City where my job was, mostly because of the cultural life that Kanazawa offered. Kanazawa is one of several smaller, culturally and historically rich cities in Japan known as “little Kyotos,” but Kanazawa in my mind earns that appellation more than any other contender for it. Unfortunately, my job in Fukui and my commute between there and our home in Kanazawa, was too much for me. Having eight a.m. classes twice a week didn’t help matters. It was exhausting, I had almost no time to write, and my university wasn’t supportive enough, in my mind, of my goals as a writer. Eventually I quit that job to focus more on my writing, and I found other, less stable means to make a living – a lot of freelancing ensued. But this is when I was able to write both Kanazawa, my novel set in the city of the same name, and The Heron Catchers, a novel coming out next fall that is partly set in Kanazawa, too.
LONG JOURNEY TO BECOMING A WRITER
I’m sure that not a soul who knew me at Earlham would ever have guessed I’d eventually author two published literary novels and have more on the way. And who could blame them? No one in my family thought I would, either, and weren’t supportive of my efforts in the beginning – which for me spanned about twenty years, or until I got my first book publication. What’s more, I come from a family of scientists, not writers or artists; I was a late-bloomer intellectually and an underachieving student most of my life; I never took either a creative writing or a literature course at Earlham (though I did take Humanities as a required sequence); a graduate school professor in my MFA program in Creative Writing unfairly failed me in a literature seminar and, after trying to bully me to stop reading Asian writers and setting my fiction in Asian countries, told me repeatedly that I’d never become a writer (and then harassed me until I graduated); I’ve lived in publishing hinterlands for most of my adult life; my ex-wife admitted to trying to sabotage my writing career because she was afraid I might become successful one day. My list goes on.
It didn’t even occur to me to be a writer until I was twenty-five and living in rural Vietnam, with a lot of time on my hands, and virtually no distractions. It was really then, for the first time in my life, that I could figure out what I wanted to do. To dream, in other words. To really dream, with nothing at all, no voices other than my own, to interfere with my search for what direction I wanted to take. At some point, escapism, let’s call it, grew to have immense appeal to me. And it turns out that writing gives that to me even more than reading does. I’m sure that all art gives this feeling to those who create it, because you get lost in it so easily. Time tends to disappear. And you disappear along with it. One’s daily stresses, too. But escapism is only a half-serious answer, I suppose.
I didn’t read much growing up. Or at least not as much as my older brother, who was valedictorian of his high school class. Unlike him, I was more involved in sports and rebelling over pointless things – trying to escape my stultifying life, which I now realize I was partly responsible for – the reason I was grounded so often during high school. I started taking my intellectual life seriously about halfway through my time at Earlham – after the study abroad program in Sapporo that I mentioned earlier. Only after returning from Sapporo did I become serious about my future. As I also said, in 1994, two years after leaving Earlham, I found myself as a volunteer teacher in Bien Hoa, Vietnam, and aside from socializing with the community there, which I dearly loved doing, I had little to do in my down-time. I studied Vietnamese quite a bit. But more importantly to me now, at least from a professional standpoint, I read. I had a huge stack of books in English that I’d acquired, and I plowed through them over my twelve months there.
Nearly all of the books were fiction, which I think was significant. And reading so much, in such an atmosphere of intense isolation from my own culture and language – because I had no access to the Internet or email, no phone, no TV or radio, no English-language newspapers or magazines, no letters from friends and family in the US that weren’t in some way destroyed before being delivered to me, and in many cases flat-out confiscated, and a single native-English-speaking acquaintance in the entire province where I was living who I almost never saw – I fell in love with literature and with the written word. I tried my hand at writing while I was there and produced some truly appalling work. Poor, blind imitations of all I was reading, and poor, blind attempts to express what I was experiencing in Vietnam. I wasn’t very good at writing fiction, but luckily I didn’t know just how bad I really was. There was no one around to tell me, or maybe the Vietnamese people in my life then were simply too kind to tell me if they knew. But had there been, I likely would have given up. (As I said, I had people tell me this later, but by then I had committed too much to writing to quit. I’ve now committed twenty-seven years to writing, and that’s usually enough time to see a positive result.) What was the most significant thing I wrote when I was starting out trying to be a writer in Vietnam? After one year in Bien Hoa, I had filled a notebook with similes and metaphors that I imagined were brilliant (they weren’t) but had little use for since I’d come up with them outside the context of any narrative. Filling this notebook wasn’t as “useless” as I once thought, though. If nothing else, I was imagining myself as a writer, and though I look back on that effort with some embarrassment, there’s no denying that I began to feel more confident expressing myself on the page. An important step, to be sure. I even began to believe that with hard work I might actually publish something. In any case, I’m convinced that had it not been for that year volunteering in a slow, countrified environment in Vietnam, where I had few distractions and the life most familiar to me was contained in novels stacked on a small bedroom bookshelf, I never would have become a writer.
Coming back to the US and trying to learn the craft of fiction was a long and difficult road. Since then, I’ve devoted many hours to that end. And I’ve read a lot more, too. I know a little more about the publishing world. And I think I might have finally found a source of inspiration for my writing in Kanazawa and Ishikawa prefecture, where Kanazawa is located. But writing has always given me pleasure – the writing of other people more than my own, since reading is a lot easier than writing – but comparing it to other fields of work I’ve done, writing comes out far ahead every time. It offers me an incomparable sense of freedom. And of getting to know better who I am and what I care about. And of being able to contribute something hopefully lasting to the cultural life I value. And of course there’s the escape factor…which I’m only half-serious about.
KANAZAWA, MY SECOND NOVEL
I wrote Kanazawa between late 2016 and mid-2019, a little less than two and a half years from first draft to submission. It was accepted for publication by Stone Bridge Press – a publisher in Berkeley, California, that’s been publishing books about Japan for over thirty years – in the spring of 2020, and it was published on January 25th of this year. (That’s more than a five-year span, which is the sort of thing that can really test your patience. My third novel, The Heron Catchers, I started in 2019, and it was accepted for publication early last month, also by Stone Bridge Press. By the time it comes out, it will have been a four-and-a-half-year span from start to publication. Already the wait to see it published is starting to make me itch. But that’s nothing compared to my first yet-to-be-published novel, set in Cambodia and Vietnam, which I continue to hammer away at, god knows why, since I started it when I was thirty and, like I said, I’m now fifty-two.)
Here’s what Kanazawa is about, in my own words. You can find a slightly different description of it on the back cover of the novel. Kanazawa is about a cross-cultural marriage between a thirty-six-year-old American man named Emmitt and his Japanese wife Mirai. Emmitt, despite having just quit his job as a university teacher, is eager for them to put their roots deeper into Kanazawa where they live and thinks that getting a machiya, or traditional Japanese wooden townhouse, that he deeply admires and associates with Japan’s cultural past, will benefit their marriage and life together. Mirai, however, unexpectedly pushes for them to move instead to Tokyo, where her sister has found a job and where Mirai also has been offered work as an ikebana artist. That opposition between small and big city life, between traditional and contemporary life in Japan, is at the heart of their conflict. At the same time, Emmitt’s parents-in-law are facing a family secret head-on for the first time, and that secret involves Mirai, without her being aware of it. It’s also behind Mirai’s father’s obsession with the many female statues in Kanazawa and Mirai’s mother’s disapproval of the drawings he makes of them. And it’s when the secret is finally dealt with, or is at least revealed to Emmitt, that he sees his marriage in a different light and he and Mirai can finally move forward together.
KANAZAWA THE PLACE
I’m not sure how many of you are aware of why Kanazawa’s so well-known. Kanazawa’s located in Ishikawa prefecture, which is on the Sea of Japan, not on the Pacific side where Tokyo is. Ishikawa stretches mostly south to north between Fukui and Toyama prefectures and is bordered by Gifu prefecture to the southeast. And Kanazawa is basically in the middle of Ishikawa, along the coast, with Komatsu and Kaga to the south and the Noto peninsula to the north. Kanazawa’s famous for a number of things, not least among them the amount of annual snowfall it gets, and in fact it’s often considered part of Japan’s Snow Country. So, winters can be severe, and wintertime tends to be long. Ishikawa is also home to Hakusan, the second most sacred mountain in Japan after Fuji-san, and enshrines the creator gods of Japan, Izanagi and Izanami. And Hakusan features in my novel rather prominently at its end. Kanazawa, and all of Ishikawa really, are also famous for their cultural attributes, whose development was encouraged by the Maeda lords of the Kaga domain prior to its becoming Ishikawa prefecture. The Maedas throughout the Edo period recruited many of the best craftsmen and artisans in Japan to serve their domain, and the traditions they started and continued there have to varying degrees lasted until today. So, Kanazawa remains a culturally rich part of Japan, and because it was one of only three major cities spared American bombing at the end of WWII, the city has been preserved in certain respects, which makes it unique. Overall it’s not as impressive as Kyoto, it’s not nearly as big or as old, but it rivals it in certain ways, particularly in the quiet charm and cultural life of the city and one’s access to arts and crafts and even nature. Also like Kyoto, Kanazawa has kept some of its beautiful old machiya architecture, though this is in danger of disappearing as many residents and developers and city planners don’t often view machiya as worth preserving. Many foreigners do, however, and we see that in my novel through the protagonist Emmitt.
MY HOPEFULLY UNIQUE APPROACH TO KANAZAWA AS A FOREIGN WRITER
As you now know, I’ve been deeply interested in Japan and Japanese literature for over thirty years. I’ve read and re-read a lot of Japanese novels and collections of stories over that period, which cumulatively, I’m sure, have influenced my writing significantly and my whole approach to storytelling in many ways. If my novel reads like it was written by a Japanese person and translated into English, it would be a sort of validation for me since that’s something I was kind of aiming for. I thought that if a foreigner were to write a novel in the Japanese tradition of novel-writing, as it were, why not me? I had that conscious aim and gave it my best shot. I had a vague notion of what “a Japanese-style novel” meant in terms of mood and atmosphere, and also its indirectness, but of course there’s no rulebook to consult about writing as I hoped I might. Mostly I went off of the confidence I had that my reading of Japanese fiction would rub off on me and my own novel. Kanazawa’s hardly been out for any length of time yet, but the people who like the book have sometimes commended it for its “Japanese sensibility” (again, whatever that means), and those who haven’t liked it would probably be appalled by that. But I think these ideas I’ve just expressed, about my intentions as I set out to write the book and how it’s been perceived so far, are important. Especially for those of us who write about Japan – or any country or culture that’s “technically” not our own – or those who may do so in the future.
One important rule of literature is that conflict drives a story, and the resolution of that conflict is generally what keeps us reading until the story’s end. And common to a lot of foreign novels set in Japan is that their primary conflicts tend to focus squarely on the protagonist’s foreignness there. In Kanazawa, that sort of conflict barely factors into my story. Emmitt has been in Japan long enough to have learned the language and culture; he has proved himself to be highly adaptable and deeply respectful of how the people around him live. That means that he relates to the Japanese people in the novel on an essentially equal footing. Because of this, as the author of Kanazawa, I can focus on other sources of conflict to move things forward. Emmitt’s clearly capable of observing and understanding what goes on in the family between its different members. The family has a lot of issues it must deal with, but none of them are centered on Emmitt. Of course, he and Mirai have their own issues, primarily about where to live – in Tokyo or Kanazawa – but again, their conflict has nothing to do with his being a gaijin. I think that’s what makes Kanazawa unique, or at least my treatment of a story steeped in contemporary Japan with an American protagonist. Emmitt’s attached to all these family-centered conflicts in the novel, but he – or should I say his foreignness – is not at their center. As an author, I almost – almost – take for granted that he’s not Japanese, and yet I never let the reader forget that he’s American.
What matters most to me about this, I guess, is the perception that yes, I’m writing about Japan as an outsider, as a non-Japanese, but I’ve done it in what I hope is the “right way” (if such a thing exists) – or not the right way, but a right way – by not exoticizing, and instead viewing the Japanese characters objectively, as Iain Maloney of the Japan Times said, portraying them as actual individuals with agency rather than simply as “other” or “them” or merely as the players of roles within a non-western family. I hope that’s true of my first novel, Lotusland, too, though interestingly literary agents and many publishers don’t seem to want these things, because they may not sell as well as novels with those other, well-established tropes, despite such approaches being frustrating to many readers these days. Viet Thanh Nguyen in The Sympathizer shows this to great effect, though he uses movies rather than novels to make the point.
I also want to say that whenever I write a novel set in a country and culture that isn’t my own, which is pretty much always, I’m cognizant of the pitfalls inherent in that and I try to avoid them. I hope it’s something that distinguishes my novels, which always have as their protagonists people like myself – but who are decidedly not myself. I’m not saying that should be an unbreakable rule, because I think that to innovate in fiction, and art in general, one should always aim to stretch boundaries and break barriers, even break so-called rules, but I do think writers need to be careful about certain sensitivities that exist now that weren’t so predominant in the recent past. At the same time, writers shouldn’t necessarily sidestep what may offend. It’s important not to be afraid to write what your novel needs. And sometimes that may be hard for readers to embrace.
QUOTES FROM THE PAST ABOUT THE VALIDITY OF LITERATURE
AND WHAT IT CAN BRING TO OUR LIVES
In a conversation with the filmmaker Paul Cronin, as reported in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the German film director Werner Herzog said: “Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it…Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.”
Much can be said about the social and political validity of fiction and literature. I don’t know how many of you regularly read literature, or value it – value it like Herzog wants you to – but I agree with him that it’s undervalued in the present age. And I, too, would like to see us step back from all the technological distractions that bombard us and instead engage more deeply and carefully with the human experience, which literature uniquely allows us to do. Literature has the capacity to teach readers empathy and compassion and to see the world and the people in it from points of view we’re unfamiliar with. This brings to mind a podcast called The Wrath-Bearing Tree that I heard a few days ago. One of its hosts mentioned that the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch once said that “The most important thing for a novel to do is to reveal that other people exist.” In response to that quote, my good friend, the author Garry Craig Powell, said: “I would add ‘and not minding that those people are different from us’.” We talk about ideals such as tolerance and diversity, but often, isn’t it merely lip service? You need a foundation from which to put those things in practice, and literature can provide that.
Probably not surprisingly, I do in fact believe that the more literature you read, the more empathic and compassionate you’re likely to become, and the more understanding of the always-evolving, always-complicated, yet endlessly fascinating human condition. In this increasingly divisive world we live in, is there anyone who would claim that having these qualities isn’t important? That’s the power of literature. Of simply reading.
Before starting my reading from Kanazawa, I want to share another quote:
Works of literature are, by their very nature, non-specialist books. They are written to criticize or depict matters of common concern to all…They bring people together, stripped naked, regardless of profession or class, and break down all such walls that separate us. Thus I believe them to be the most worthy and least harmful means for binding us together as human beings.
This quote, translated from Japanese to English by Jay Rubin in his Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State, is by Natsume Soseki, whose novel Kokoro was the first Japanese novel I ever read, assigned in a course on Japanese Culture that I took here one semester. The quote dates from the early 1900s and to me its relevance hasn’t dimmed since Soseki’s lifetime. (He died in 1916.)
All of these quotes, in fact, reverberate to me as almost immutable truths, and they will continue to reverberate no less truthfully in the years, the decades, to come, I’m quite certain.
CONCLUSION
Aside from whether or not I’ve whetted your appetite to read Kanazawa, I do hope you’ve come to see in me some possibility for yourselves after leaving Earlham with a degree in Japanese Studies or whatever field you earn a degree in. I’ve moved around a lot in the thirty years since graduating from here, and I’ve held more jobs than most of my friends have. It would have been nice, maybe, to have lived a more settled and conventional life, but I also wouldn’t be where I am today if I’d done so, nor would I have accumulated the experiences I have, and the somewhat unique ways I’ve learned to process them. It’s these two things – experience and my understanding of them – which allow me to draw on them for the fiction I’ve written and will continue to write. I often tell people who show an interest in what I’m doing, “Hey, if I can do this and be successful at it, then anyone can. You just have to find your way to it.” Earlham, for me, and the paths it pointed me down, was my way of finding what I most wanted to do with my life. It took me time to recognize this. And that’s okay. Like I said, I’ve always been a late-bloomer. But better to come to the game late than never come at all.